Therapist leads patients into their past lives to cure present phobias

In the surroundings of her comfortable home at Redmire, she uses past life regression to identify the origin of a problem before exploring, tackling and removing it from her patient's life.

The former nurse, who also worked as an air hostess for eight years, works only with the consent of a client's GP and only to help alleviate medical or psychological problems.

"I never use past life regression for kicks," she says. "It's not a stage show; it is a technique to find a seeding event to help unlock a problem."

She is held in high regard by many in the medical profession and a good proportion of her clients are referred to her by their doctors.

"There has always got to be a reason for fears and phobias and it is my job to find that reason," she says. "Whatever the phobia, there is always a trigger, something that has happened to cause the fear."

Sometimes the trigger has happened in the client's current life but it has been blanked out by the mind because of the trauma.

Others appear, under hypnosis, to have lived previous lives in which an event is linked directly to today's problem.

Ms Musgrave's neighbour and friend, Joan Cresswell, is among the success stories. Fearful of heights since childhood, to the extent that she would not even lean from an upstairs window, she is now happy to climb the loftiest buildings.

Regression suggested she had once lived as a young boy in India, who looked after geese. She recalled standing on a cliff, watching a massacre below.

Further work deduced she had fallen to her death from the cliff.

Sessions aimed at dealing with the problem resulted in complete removal of the phobia and a willingness to climb high staircases and stand on ledges. Managers at nearby Bolton Castle even allowed her special access to the tower to test her newfound calm.

A second regression revealed a former life as an Egyptian woman trapped in an unhappy arranged marriage to a soldier. The session took her through violent head pains to her death in a tent.

"I can still see that tent in the desert, but it doesn't frighten me" says Mrs Cresswell, who described the experience as similar to the half asleep feeling just before one succumbs to full sleep.

"I felt very relaxed, as if I were standing back from the action, a bit like watching it on television. It was like lying on a feather mattress, completely relaxed and everything was going on at a distance.

"However, I was aware of where I was and, if a dog barked or the doorbell rang, I heard it but it made no difference to me.

"I thought I was away for perhaps ten minutes but it was actually 40 minutes. Answering Eunice's questions was quite an effort to get the words out and I had to think hard about speaking."

Mrs Cresswell was also cured of a fear of travelling in cars, sparked by a father and a first husband whose fast driving terrified her.

Ms Musgrave quit nursing to become an air hostess, but was keen to return to the medical world following the break-up of her marriage.

She completed an NVQ in health studies while working at the former Thornton Lodge nursing home, near Aysgarth. In October 2001, she gained a diploma in clinical hypnotherapy from the Northern College of Therapeutic Hypnosis after studying at Leeds Infirmary.

"I always had an interest in anything that was to do with helping people to get better," she says. "I felt we were entering an age where alternative therapy was becoming part of accepted medicine and the medical profession is certainly taking an interest.

"Unfortunately, we are tainted by the stage hypnotists, about whom I have nothing good to say. They get paid for making people look foolish."

Ms Musgrave is also called upon to lecture on the subject across the north of England. Her audiences at Newcastle General Hospital, Leeds Infirmary and Sheffield University include doctors, dentists, professors and eminent psychologists.

Past life regression almost always identifies the cause of a fear, she says.

"A common phobia is a fear of water and it is nearly always traced back to having drowned in a previous life."

One client, so terrified of water that she struggled to wash her hair, had apparently been killed in the sixteenth century on a ducking stool when accused of being a witch.

In another lifetime, she was a Scottish boy who drowned in a fishing boat accident in 1906.

A student with whom Ms Musgrave was working suffered asthmatic-type panic attacks, when she felt as though something tight round her throat was restricting her breathing. Regression suggested she had been a man hanged for murder.

In perhaps the most uncanny case, an 18-year-old female student regressed to life as a coal miner in the Thirties and gave precise details of her address and family.

After the session, the girl traced the house and was told by the occupier that a miner of that name had lived there. The miner's children were still alive, now in their sixtiess or seventies, but the student - who the regression suggested had been their father - opted not to visit them.

"There is no danger associated with any of this," says Ms Musgrave. "You never take the power away from the client and the client is always in control. If they want to stop at any point, they can bring themselves back to full consciousness."

She has had considerable success with patients who suffer severe pain.

"You can remove someone from their pain but you never take the pain away, because it is a safety measure," she says. "People with chronic pain can be distanced from it and I have used it in labour wards."

Her technique can also be used to help people quit smoking, for weight control or even to tackle habits such as nail biting.

She has never come across anyone who failed to be hypnotised, although clients with more inquiring and sceptical minds require a more "authoritarian" script and several simultaneous issues to occupy their minds as they go into their subconscious state.

She has also never found anyone who did not reveal a past life, although the client chooses which "door" to go through.

"We can be reborn within months or even weeks of death, or it could be hundreds of years," she says.

While most clients reveal details of their regression in English, a handful have spoken in foreign languages.

Ms Musgrave's dream is to study in America for a doctorate and, if possible, help ongoing research into past life regression.

"I feel there is a great future for hypnotherapy in association with the medical profession, providing hypnotherapists realise what their place is in the whole order of things. They must realise they are a very minor part of the whole healing process.